Collective Arts is a Hamilton, Ontario-based beverage company that does a lot more than just make and sell drinks. While the company’s product lineup includes craft beer, cider, spirits, ready-to-drink (RTD), and non-alcoholic wares, Collective Arts describes itself as a beverage lifestyle company. This lifestyle encompasses art, imagination, and diversity, a worldview summarized by the company slogan, “drink creatively.”
Drinking in a creative manner means “challenging the status quo,” says Chief of Staff Toni Shelton. “Consumers make a choice every single day when they pick up a drink. By picking up a Collective Arts drink, you’re supporting artists, you’re supporting the local economy, you’re supporting your neighbours, you’re supporting innovation.”
The company matches this celebration of creativity with business acumen and a commitment to quality. Collective Arts sources natural ingredients and utilizes a huge variety of hops to add flavour to its craft beers. The team sells its products worldwide, operates brick and mortar locations in Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario, and maintains a broad, entrepreneurial vision.
Collective Arts primarily works within three product categories: craft beer and RTD products (this segment includes canned cocktails and the like), non-alcoholic beverages, and cannabis-infused drinks.
Craft beers from the company include Collective Lager, Ransack The Universe, Life in The Clouds, and Jam Up The Mash, a “juicy, sour, and extremely refreshing” beer. RTD offerings range from a Blood Orange & Lime Margarita to Skinnycap vodka sodas and beyond, while Guava Gose, Hazy Pale Ale, and Emerald Stout comprise some of the brand’s non-alcoholic brews. And all beverages come in wildly illustrated bottles and cans featuring unique artwork.
The company originated in 2013 when Matt Johnston, who worked for independent Canadian brewery Moosehead, joined forces with Bob Russell, who worked in the art and design sector, to create a craft beer brewery.
Initially, the business sold “one or two SKUs” (it’s first product was a craft beer called Rhyme or Reason), recalls Shelton. Soon, the company also began to branch out and started making cider as well as craft beer. It now offers Local Press Apple Cider and Local Press Apple & Cherry Cider, with 5.6 percent and 5.8 percent ABV (Alcohol by Volume) respectively.
From there, the company expanded into spirits, particularly gin, and then non-alcoholic wares. Gin offerings include Lavender & Juniper Gin (containing botanicals such as orris root, juniper, coriander, heather, chamomile, and lavender), artisanal dry gin, and Rhubarb & Hibiscus Gin. And once more, there was a strong emphasis on quality and creativity.
“We felt we could be experiential and creative and disrupt that premium [spirits] category with art on bottles. So, we developed a unique system where all of our bottles are painted. You can peel the label off, and you get a beautiful bottle,” explains Shelton. Artists can submit their work to Collective Arts for possible inclusion on a bottle, store wall, merchandise, or another surface. If the company selects an artist’s work, they will be offered a licensing deal, with Collective Arts reserving one percent of revenue to pay for this service.
The company’s Toronto and Hamilton locations offer patrons a full-on Collective Arts experience. The Toronto facility consists of a taproom, kitchen, café, music venue, and retail space. It features “rotating music—we have jazz nights, piano bar nights,” and other special events, says Shelton. The Hamilton locale offers a slightly different mix; in addition to a 10,000-square-foot event space, retail store, and beer garden, the Hamilton branch also houses the company’s manufacturing operations.
Collective Arts’ fun and well-conceived marketing strategy centres around community building and storytelling. The team attends trade shows, maintains an active social media presence, and celebrates its relationships with artists to get its name out, as well as relying on proactive email campaigns. “Email marketing is where we really thrive,” says Shelton. “We have a really strong database. We’re up to 80,000 consumers on our database, and communicate with them weekly.”
It’s all about the product here, and Collective Arts takes a huge amount of pride in its brewing, distilling, and mixing processes. “On the beer side, craft breweries in general are going to be using higher quality ingredients than macro breweries… I think we may be one of the top hop buyers in the country… It’s all about the quality and quantity of the hops,” says Shelton, referring to one of the main ingredients in beer-making.
In terms of RTDs, Collective Arts “procures real ingredients” including “real blood oranges from Italy and real mango juice that we use in our cocktails. We also use real spirits, where a lot of companies will use a neutral grain spirit.”
And the company takes the same approach to its energy drink line. This line—called Wide Eyed Energy—includes Blood Orange Vanilla BOOST, Lemon Berry BOOST, Raspberry Lime MAX, and other drinks made without sugar, preservatives, or artificial sweeteners. Shelton compares Wide Eyed Energy drinks to sparkling water, adding, “We’ve actually steeped all the fruit and ingredients to give them a bold flavour without having to add in all that extra stuff.”
The company’s non-alcoholic beer (a rapidly growing category for people who are wary about intoxicants), is tastier than the competition’s, claims Shelton. Most breweries simply remove alcohol from their brew to create non-alcoholic beer—a process that can result in lackluster suds. Collective Arts, by contrast, relies on a controlled fermentation process involving a type of yeast “that slowly ferments the beer so you can control the flavour” while keeping alcohol content to a minimum, Shelton explains.
The company also offers a line of cannabis-infused beverages, which are sold in Canada under the brand name Collective Project (the brand separation stems from Canadian regulations that aim to keep alcohol and cannabis companies apart). Products include a cherry and vanilla sparkling juice called Cosmic Cowboy and White Peach & Cardamom seltzer.
“We’re the top selling cannabis beverage in Canada. We have about nine SKUs on the market. It’s very much based on the Collective Arts non-alcoholic portfolio: juices, sparkling waters,” says Shelton.
The company’s devotion to taste and innovation has been recognized by the beverage industry. Rum and gin from Collective Arts have earned gold, silver, and bronze awards at the London Spirits Competition in the UK while the company’s Lavender & Juniper Gin was named Best Flavored Gin at the 2021 San Francisco World Spirits Competition. Last fall, non-Alcoholic Guava Gose took home a Gold at the 2024 Canada Beer Cup Awards (a competition for independent breweries), while Stranger than Fiction Porter earned a Bronze at the World Beer Cup 2016. The company was also named Brand of the Year in 2020 by Strategy magazine, which covers the Canadian marketing and advertising sectors.
Today, Collective Arts has approximately 100 employees, including staff at the manufacturing plant in Hamilton and sales teams in Canada and the United States, and the company’s website contains a detailed code of conduct for its workers that prohibits bigoted and toxic behaviour. This code of conduct is a reflection of the fact that creativity requires diversity, says Shelton. At the same time, the company also wants “passionate folks who are entrepreneurial… When it comes to finding the right people, it’s a mix of what I call ‘head up’ and ‘head down,’” she continues.
In simple terms, this means staff members who can look into the future, watch for trends, and help with planning without losing sight of day-to-day operations and any areas or processes where the company can improve.
Going forward, Collective Arts is “very much in test phase on the non-alcoholic innovation front. We’re still trying to learn and find out what’s resonating with consumers, what needs to be tweaked here and there. Ultimately, we’re bringing out new flavours, new formats,” states Shelton.
Asked what the company’s goals are for the next few years, she tells us that “it’s to be a global leader in the three categories that we are currently in… We want to create a brand where consumers can open their fridge and it all be Collective Arts. That’s going to be an amazing thing.”
